Mary Roberts

On her book Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists, and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture

Cover Interview of February 01, 2017

The wide angle

There has been much debate over the last
decade about expanding our discipline to create a global history of art, but
what precisely are the new methods and protocols for writing these more
encompassing transcultural histories? It has long been my conviction that
Istanbul and its cross-cultural webs of art and patronage have much to tell us
about a global history.

In this book I propose a network model for
understanding these interconnections. Istanbul was a context where European artists
were working alongside Muslim and Non-Muslim Ottomans. Many artistic
initiatives received patronage from both foreign diplomatic communities and the
Ottoman court. This book attends to these patterns and processes of
transcultural artistic exchange. Tracking Istanbul’s multi-sited and multi-directional
art connections discloses the nodes and vectors that register the
particularities of Istanbul as a place of cross-cultural contact while also
situating Istanbul’s exchanges within a global history.

This is a history of art attuned to
patterns of artistic exchange that accounts for the movement of art works in
and out of Istanbul and its changing meaning on the move. Art produced in this
context was created, apprehended and interpreted within a cross-cultural web of
meanings. Sometimes this web was a battlefield of competing representations, at
other times it was a negotiated matrix of divergent positions. Such
cross-cultural transmission was also entangled within patterns of
misinterpretation, as visual forms were created, reshaped, censored, or
productively misunderstood. This served to produce divergent forms of agency of
art works and artists.

In this book I characterize transcultural
artworks as “networked objects.” The Young Album analysed in chapter one
exemplifies this concept. This album, a history of the sultanate through
portraiture, was the single most influential visual codification of the Ottoman
dynastic image in the nineteenth century. Commissioned by Sultan Selim III in
1806, it was originally intended as a gift in Ottoman-European diplomatic
exchange relations, but the album had a much more unstable history across the
century as it shuttled back and forth between Istanbul and London.

As part of this historical mobility there
were multiple shifts in the Young Album’s image economy: from diplomatic
gift culture to consumer culture and from luxury album to intimate cartes de
visite. In these different iterations it was variously co-opted for Ottoman
and British versions of the Empire’s history. Through processes of
supplementation with additional text and images rupturing the aesthetic
coherence of the original Ottoman commission, the cultural boundaries of this
work of art were redrawn. Divergent centers of power were imputed, as different
forms of authorship were claimed, conflicting versions of Ottoman history were
inscribed, and alternate audiences were engaged. Through this durational case
study, cultural encounter emerges as a procedure entailing multiple
transformations and multiple local effects.

Istanbul Exchanges builds on ideas developed in my book, Intimate Outsiders: The
Harem in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature
(Duke University Press, 2007). I engaged debates on gender and Orientalism
through a study of representations of the harem by Orientalist artists, women
travel writers, and it was the first study of elite Ottoman women who
commissioned their own portraits. I characterized artist’s embedded in foreign
cultures as Intimate Outsiders, coining this term to characterize the forms of
privileged access of European women to Ottoman culture, as well as the
familiarity of elite Ottoman women with European art in this period of Ottoman
modernization. I emphasized the sustained tension between intimacy and
outsideness in this term as a model for understanding artistic production in a
cross-cultural context.

[M]odern art still commonly refers to a rather narrow range of meaning and scope. It basically focuses on developments in Paris (Impressionism etc.) in the nineteenth century, and to selected Euro-American movements in the twentieth century (Cubism, Abstract Expressionism etc). But if we understand modernity as a socially transformative condition that was in force across much of the world from the nineteenth century on, how are we to understand artistic practices that were associated with these momentous changes?Iftikhar Dadi, Interview of March 26, 2012

The two world wars of the twentieth century were a product of the dislocations brought about of modernization in an environment where great power competition and the drive for hegemony were conducted primarily by violent means. Now that this era has passed in Europe and is receding in much of the Pacific rim, and hegemony achieved by force is no longer considered a legitimate ambition, the security requirements and fears of great powers should decline.Richard Ned Lebow, Interview of October 4, 2010